SHATTERED-LIGHT

EP4: THE BLEED

The next Bleed visited after the query.

I had tried to build an emotional carapace around myself, something guilt-proof that would keep me from looking too closely at what we had caused, but the effort proved abortive. The second-floor northeast window faced across the street, and glass was a major part of the structural architecture of my meditative space. I had told myself I wasn't looking toward the north, but my eyes had a mind of their own. It was always subconscious, the way they found that direction before I had the chance to stop them.

On a very good day, I had chosen to stay off the bigger screen. The board had recommended social engagement through my mobile phone instead, and it had been a while, so my notifications were unusually generous. I was kind enough to click anyway. Jeremy appeared to have posted thirty minutes earlier.

That was the first thing that welcomed me.

It was human to check it out. My hands moved automatically to his profile, then to the message icon, and I hated the impulsivity of the action almost as soon as I had made it. I began reading our conversation word for word, and every sentence seemed to contain something it had never contained the first day I read it. The words were beating now. Alive in a way they had not been before. Each one seemed to carry a weight I had somehow been too blind to notice, and before I realized it, tears had accumulated in my eyes.

I let them roll freely.

Perhaps the best way to understand the gravity of what we cause other people is to deliberately place ourselves at the other end of the story, to stand where they had stood and read our actions from their side. I wasn't sure where the hurt was coming from. Maybe it was regret, maybe it was the effect of our actions finally reaching me, or perhaps it was simply the knowledge that I could no longer separate myself from the person who had been hurt by what we did. Whatever it was, something was doing most of the hurting now.

The old friend.

It hadn't visited in six months, but its arrival was oddly familiar. I felt the cold first, the kind that seemed to begin somewhere beneath the skin rather than in the room, followed by a subtle crackling sensation, like shattering glass spreading quietly through me. My hearing sharpened until ordinary sounds became intrusive, the smallest hum from the house suddenly carrying the weight of something much louder, while light seemed too bright and every surface too close. My heart began to race without asking permission, my breath shortened, and the familiar pressure gathered behind my eyes.

Then the veins beneath my skin became almost luminous, branching across my arms like lightning trapped beneath glass. I knew what they meant. I knew what usually followed them, the loss of control, the sensory flooding, the body becoming an instrument tuned far beyond what it was meant to hear. Still, I had never been able to convince myself that they weren't beautiful. There was something almost hypnotic about watching those blue lines emerge and spread beneath my skin, delicate and intricate against the darker surface. It was a morbid curiosity, perhaps, to find beauty in the very thing that frightened me, but the Bleed had always possessed that strange contradiction. It could make my own body look like something worth staring at while making the rest of the world unbearable.

At that stage, the house finally unveiled the usefulness that hid beneath its glamour. What looked like an extravagant home had been designed around the particular inconveniences of my existence. The glass was treated to control the intensity of light, the temperature adjusted itself before I could feel the change, and the rooms were fitted with systems that monitored sound, air quality, movement and the smallest shifts in my vital signs. When the Bleed came, the house did not panic with me. It responded. Curtains sealed themselves against the light, the unnecessary sounds disappeared, the temperature settled, and the medical systems quietly took over the work my body could no longer manage. For all its polished surfaces and beautiful architecture, the house had always been part residence, part refuge, and part machine built to keep me alive.

The beeping was louder now.

That was the last thing I remembered.

I remembered waking to my mom beside me, her face close enough for me to read the information gathered in her eyes before she said anything. There was too much in them, too much concern, too many questions she probably already knew the answers to, and the peculiar exhaustion of someone who had spent hours waiting for another person to return to themselves.

A lot must have happened in my absence.

She must have climbed Turny Mountain to bring me back.